Friday, August 20, 2010

Closing in on the inflaton, mother of the universe: "Until recently, however, this idea was still missing a crucial ingredient. To push space-time apart, the inflaton's field must maintain a potential energy in apparently empty space, known as "vacuum" energy. But physicists were long convinced that a unified particle would be too quick to give up the energy of its field, resulting in no inflation.

Now Antusch and colleagues have found a way to extend the time in which the field has a high vacuum energy, by prolonging the period in which the unified particle is nearly massless (arxiv.org/abs/1003.3233)."